IAM1813 – CEO Develops Software to Help Businesses Reduce Challenges With Finding Files

Why it was selected for “CBNation Architects”:

In this episode of the I AM CEO Podcast, host Gresham Harkless interviews Michelle Eichner, the founder and CEO of Digitile. Digitile is a software company that helps businesses address the challenges of finding files. With her extensive background in marketing and SaaS software, Michelle brings a deep understanding of the marketplace and a wealth of experience in driving product marketing and strategy.

During the discussion, Michelle discusses the importance of reducing the challenges employees face when searching for files within organizations. She highlights the need for effective file management systems and shares how Digitile's software addresses these challenges. Michelle also provides valuable insights on networking and the benefits of finding mentors who can provide an outside perspective.

Throughout the episode, Michelle mentions helpful resources and tools such as Notion and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which have been instrumental in her work. She also shares her website at digitile.io, where listeners can learn more about the services offered by Digitile and sign up for a free trial. Michelle can also be found on LinkedIn.

Overall, this episode provides valuable insights into the importance of efficient file management within businesses. Michelle's expertise and experience in the software and marketing industry make her insights particularly relevant for entrepreneurs and business owners looking to streamline their file organization processes.

Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s CEO Web Shop. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE.

Transcription:

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Michelle Eichner Teaser 00:00

There are some nuances that make actually finding a file hard. Their search engines are actually not very robust. They don't actually check within the context of that file, whereas Google does. Salesforce does not. HubSpot does not. So some of these guys do something different and unique.

And then also, so how you search, how you share files is unique by platform. You have to log in to all these platforms. We wanted to unify this experience so that even though each of these had their own nuances, you didn't have to worry about those.

Intro 00:33

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:57

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we've hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, just like you, what I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month we are focusing on CEO hacks and CEO nuggets. This is by far one of my favorite questions I asked on the show. In other words, I asked, what are the apps, books, and habits that make you more effective and efficient? Those were the CEO hacks. And then I asked for a word of wisdom or a piece of advice or something that you might tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine. Those were the CEO nuggets.

That's what we'll focus on this month and some of the top ones that can instantly impact your business. I love all the questions, but with every episode, I thought I would walk away with something I could look at and implement right there to save precious resources, time and money. Or I would also learn about the advice, tips and tidbits or tools of the trade on how to level up our organization. So you'll hear some of these this month. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresham Harkless from I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Michelle Eichner of DigiTile. Michelle, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Michelle Eichner 02:33

Hey, thank you, Gresham. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Gresham Harkless 02:36

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Michelle so you can learn a little bit more about her, and hear about all the awesome things that she's doing.

Michelle is the founder and CEO of DigiTile. She works with businesses to reduce the challenges employees have finding files. Eichner is a seasoned marketer and SaaS software veteran with a deep understanding of the marketplace for more than 25 years of in-depth B2B experience, driving product marketing and strategy helps identify market challenges, gaps, and solutions.

Michelle, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Michelle Eichner 03:09

Absolutely.

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Gresham Harkless 03:11

Awesome. Let's do it. So first question I have was just to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

Michelle Eichner 03:17

Sure. So probably like many other CEOs, I had a pain point. So I was the head of marketing at a startup in New York. I had about 10 people on my team and we created content for the internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. What I found is we would store things in Google Drive, we have some things in Dropbox, we had files living in Salesforce, we had files living in HubSpot, in all sorts of different places.

Inevitably, someone would slack me or someone on my team or email us and say, Hey, where's the latest data sheet? Where's the latest client presentation? And we would have to stop. We'd be disrupted and we'd have to help, then get to the link of the file. I figured at some point, there's got to be a method to the madness to help people find files faster.

Ultimately, I didn't find a lot out there, and I set out to build something that could conveniently help you search across cloud platforms for your file, irrespective of where it resided in order to just quickly have a very sophisticated search engine that goes and finds what you need.

Gresham Harkless 04:19

Awesome. That's a genius idea. And as always, as any entrepreneur says, there has to be a better way and you found that better way. So I wanted to drill a little bit deeper and hear a little bit more like how your service works, how exactly it works, what platforms might work with Digitile.

Michelle Eichner 04:33

Sure. It's very simple. It actually takes about 30 seconds to set up your account with Digitile. We do have a free trial. Once you do that, we then ask you to connect or sync your Google drive, your Dropbox, your Slack account, your Gmail. Those are things you authorize. Once you do that, then it's a two-way authentication through the APIs of these other companies. From there, we never take possession of the file. We merely can search across these different platforms, to then find the file you need.

So if you're looking for the latest case study that you might have done for your clients and you type in something specific, we check not just the title of the file, but we also have natural language processing that will go through and identify any of the text related to your search.

We have image recognition. So if you have an image in there and you we've got image recognition. you'll be able to identify files that have relevant images. So we built a sophisticated engine that goes across these different platforms and simply finds the files for you.

Gresham Harkless 05:30

Yeah, I love that. And like you said, where exactly is it? What's the latest file and how exactly do I find access to it? But to be able to sign into a platform that allows you to synchronize all those different software and services is pretty incredible.

Michelle Eichner 05:43

Great. Yeah, it is. So far, we've had a great response to the service.

Gresham Harkless 05:46

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This is what differentiates you or makes you unique or your organization unique. So could you give us an example of your secret sauce?

Michelle Eichner 05:57

Yeah. So from a company perspective, each of these platforms have different behaviors and different elements that when you go search a file in Dropbox, there's some nuances with that. That makes actually finding a file hard. Their search engines are actually not very robust. They don't actually check within the context of that file, whereas Google does, Salesforce does not, HubSpot does not. So some of these guys do something different and unique.

Then also, so how you search, how you share files is unique by platform and you have to log in all these platforms. We wanted to unify this experience so that even though each of these had their own nuances, you didn't have to worry about those. You could do it however, the one way and have a consistent experience across these. So a good example is sharing when you want to share a file, let's say you've got a new employee starting and you've got ten different documents that you want to give that new employee.

Some live in Google Drive. Some might live in Slack because you happen to Slack to a channel and you don't want to log into each of these platforms separately to go, here are the three files. So what we did is we made sharing possible across platforms. So you just literally say, here are 10 files I want to share, and I want to make the experience very simple so that you're not logging in all these locations. We'll go through the process of pulling from each of these locations, but you have to just go through this process once. So we unify your experience across all these different platforms, and that's part of the secret sauce.

The other secret sauce is the search engine that makes finding files fast. It's seamless to you, but there's a big, heavy-lifting algorithm on the back end that's doing all these processes to give you the pop file that is most relevant to what you're looking for.

Gresham Harkless 07:45

That makes perfect sense. I think that's pretty awesome, just because it's like you're able to tap into the secret sauces of all these different platforms. Then you're able to make your own kind of secret recipe or secret sauce based on that because you understand the strengths and weaknesses of all these different platforms. So I think that's a great idea and a great company that you're building.

I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. The CEO hack could be an app like yours, or it could be a book or something that you use or lean on a regular everyday basis that makes you effective and efficient as a business owner.

Michelle Eichner 08:17

So I've got a couple different things that we use app-wise that we find helpful at Digitile for us. Not a lot of people know about a project management tool called Notion. And I think of Notion as a mash-up of Trello, Asana, Slack, Evernote. I could probably go on even maybe a Gmail and sorts. It's like the perfect tool that offers the most flexibility for you to manage your just everyday life at work, even at home if you wanted, but nonetheless, and manage all the projects and all the tasks and have communications going back and forth.

It truly is a mash-up of about ten different products in one. So its flexibility just really helps the team come together, focus and just understand exactly who's doing what, where things are in stages, and lets us easily communicate with one another as far as what do we need to do or what the pass off is or what have you. So from a product or an application, I would say that's been a good hack. I wouldn't call that a hack. It's just a good valuable app.

As far as hacks, interestingly enough, I think one of the hacks that I've come to appreciate is, so we're a business-to-business company. We'd sell to other businesses and we use LinkedIn Sales Navigator quite a bit. LinkedIn has a tool called LinkedIn Helper. And LinkedIn Helper allows you to take essentially a download of all the profile information so you can start to really build a targeted list. Then from there, there are other hacks that allow you to essentially communicate an email with these people, not through in the mail.

So there are lots of little hacks that have helped us communicate, target, and hone in on our potential customer audience.

Gresham Harkless 10:02

I love those two hacks and especially obviously LinkedIn. I haven't heard of the other one. What was it called one more time?

Michelle Eichner 10:08

The app or the LinkedIn Helper. Oh, so the app is called Notion.

Gresham Harkless 10:11

Notion. Yeah, I actually have not heard of that, so I would love to check that out. But again, being able to pull from the greatness of Evernote and all these other platforms and be able to mash it up, like you said, into one is definitely a great CEO hack that we can definitely check out.

So now I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. This might be a word of wisdom or piece of advice or something you might tell your younger business self.

Michelle Eichner 10:33

Yeah. So when you become a CEO, I think it's important to, this is not news, right? You need to be able to network. And depending on where you are in your career, you've built up probably a fairly large network of people that you've worked with and met over the years. What I'm finding is, if you've done a good job of building those relationships over time, networking when it counts and when you really need to call upon people, whether it's just for advice, to brainstorm, to ask for opinions, to ask for, do you want to participate in a beta program? Would you consider being a client?

Whatever, that ask is a lot easier when you've had relationships or you've cemented relationships in a way that allows you to pick up the phone five years later, frankly, even 10 years later and not skip a beat and not feel awkward about making that call because it's tough sometimes to start calling on people you haven't spoken to in a long time. So I think, probably one of the most important things for me was just recognizing, hey, I did just naturally a good job of kind of keeping in touch and cementing relationships where I felt comfortable, but then there were cases where I didn't.

Then there was like, okay, how do I break that ice and try to not make this such an awkward approach when I wanted to ask that individual, for advice or get their thoughts with respect to market trends or frankly join our beta. We tend to get ideas, you think that sales will just come, but there's a lot of hard work in building the business and networking that I think entrepreneurs probably underestimate.

Gresham Harkless 12:12

Yeah, absolutely. And it obviously helps out a ton if you have relationships that you've already built to be able to pull on. So still there's some type of kind of awkwardness or something, or it's a little bit different. So you have to be able to navigate that and there's a lot of other things you have to juggle as a CEO. So, definitely, networking is a big part of that.

Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're having different CEOs on this podcast, but I wanted to ask you specifically what does being a CEO means to you?

Michelle Eichner 12:40

So to me, it's wearing a lot of hats and being flexible to play the different roles, especially when you're small and you don't have a big set of resources to rely on. I think it's also around being able to make good educational decisions. I think everybody's going to make mistakes. If you made the mistake based on foundational information that helped you make the decision, it is what it is. But, I think you've got to be prepared to play every hat and recognize you may have strengths and certainly weaknesses. You need to understand those strengths, and certainly play on those strengths. Where you have weaknesses, don't be afraid to outsource, don't be afraid to delegate.

And at the same time, recognize, how far you can take some of these weaknesses to overcome some of them too. So there are things that we early on may have outsourced that over time we realized we actually had skills that we could do if we just put a little time and effort into it. And now we do some of these things we used to outsource. Conversely, there are probably things now that we recognize we don't want to spend and waste our time on. There is an expert that can get us from point A to point B a lot quicker. Even though we're trying to be mindful of dollars, we have to go, is that dollar worth, is it worth my time at this point in where we are in the business? Versus spending a few bucks that we may not have considered.

All these things just play into the CEO being flexible, making decisions, and honestly being really in tune with your business.

Gresham Harkless 14:08

I love that definition, Michelle. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there was anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know and how best people can get ahold of you.

Michelle Eichner 14:17

Sure. So things that I think everyone should be aware of is, finding mentors, right? And having an outside perspective in my opinion has been very helpful from time to time. Actually, I do have a really good plug for CEOs out there, depending on where they are in their business. Early on, I discovered the small business development center, which is an arm of the SBA, and there's no cost to businesses and they are consultants and you get an advisor who essentially you can go in and talk to from there.

If you have questions about legal, if you have questions about accounting, if you have questions about marketing, they bring experts in to speak with you. It has been a great resource. I meet with them at least probably quarterly, sometimes more, sometimes less depending on what our needs are. So I want to share that because I think it's a service that a lot of entrepreneurs aren't familiar with the small business development center, is an arm of the SBA that they can have a team of experts and advisors that they can access at no cost. You just have to sign up and get going.

So that's probably my biggest lead behind as far as those entrepreneurs out there who are either early on or just getting going and want to find some mentors. But I think getting mentors is very important. Recognize that, I think it's an important component of helping you grow and seeing past your four walls.

Gresham Harkless 15:35

Now I wanted to see if somebody wants to reach out to you and they want to take advantage of that trial, what's the best way for them to do that as well?

Michelle Eichner 15:42

Sure. So our website is digitile.io. We have a free trial on that site. If anyone wants to contact me, they can either just do it right through the form online. They can LinkedIn with me. I'm happy to chat and chat with people who are interested in entrepreneurship or want to bounce ideas or in the SAAS business.

So if you have questions about starting a SaaS business, by all means, feel free to reach out even through LinkedIn and I'm happy to chat.

Gresham Harkless 16:10

Awesome. I truly appreciate you, Michelle. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Michelle Eichner 16:14

Thank you, Gresham. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Outro 16:16

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, and everywhere you listen to podcasts, subscribe and leave us a five-star rating.

Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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